Mission & Purpose

The American Institute for History Education’s mission is to provide substantive, engaging historical content and activities for teachers to use in their classrooms that will dramatically increase students’ comprehension of historical events, personalities, issues, and trends. The American Institute for History Education’s programs will also produce a marked increase in students’ problem solving and thinking skills, through substantive application activities. Students will see a historical continuum, not a series of disconnected events.

Purpose of the Institute

The American Institute for History Education was founded to provide history teachers with high quality professional development programs, firmly anchored in rich historical content, along with substantive historical lessons, activities, and resources to use in their classrooms. The AIHE appreciates the tremendous need for teachers to have access to optimum quality historical content and more advanced resources. Study after study, and results from NAEP testing, demonstrate that American students are not receiving competent history-education opportunities. Both students and teachers have been subjected to banal textbooks and programs that barely skim over the crucial issues in American History.

Students need to be engaged in substantive historical content. Only through reading solid, exciting historical narratives and working with primary source material will students grasp the essential events of American History and proficiently comprehend the crucial issues of modern society.

The American Institute for History Education believes that students will rise to high expectations if teachers provide them with the means. Voluminous empirical and quantitative research verifies this. Students will comprehend abstract ideas and think critically once they have a competent base of knowledge. Thinking skills will increase commensurate with the amount of data students retain. The American Institute for History Education works to provide teachers with the materials to help students analyze erudite historical material, process the information, synthesize substantive data, and articulate reasoned conclusions.

"To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child." Cicero